“Leave it alone.” I raise my voice above the loud rumble of outboard engines, turned in my seat so I can talk to him.

“But why does this thing have to be right here?” He places his hand protectively between the buckle and his “privates,” as he calls them.

“The straps have to be routed so they restrain the body’s hard points.” I sound like a stuffy scientist making a sophomoric pun and am conscious of the handsome pilot, who was introduced as Giorgio Labella, and I can’t forget a name when it belongs to someone who looks like that. I feel his large, dark eyes glancing at me as I talk. I feel them on the back of my neck as if a warm tongue has touched me there.

Technically, I’ve never cheated on my husband, Benton Wesley, to whom I’ve been devoted for the better part of twenty years. It doesn’t count that I cheated with him when he was married to someone else, because that’s different from cheating on him. It doesn’t count that I was briefly involved with an ATF agent assigned to Interpol in France when Benton was in a federal witness protection program and presumed dead.

Any involvements before Benton or after I believed he was no longer alive are irrelevant, and I rarely think of those individuals, including a few I will never make confessions about, as the consequences would be unnecessarily damaging to all involved. I behave myself, but it doesn’t mean I’m not interested. Being faithful to my commitments doesn’t mean thoughts don’t cross my mind or that I’m foolish enough to believe I’m not capable. As a somewhat isolated professional woman in a mostly male world, I’ve never lacked opportunities to cheat, even now that I’m not in my thirties anymore and could be someone’s de facto mother.

To the young men I encounter in the line of duty I’m ripe fruit and cheese served on a formidable platter, I suppose. A cluster of red grapes and figs with a soft Taleggio on a plate featuring a distinguished coat of arms, perhaps, or a trophy, as Benton suggested. I am a chief. I am a director. I have a special reservist rank of colonel in the Air Force and am important to the Pentagon. Power is the forbidden appetizer the Labellas want to sample, if I’m honest with myself, and Benton says I’m not. A trophy, I think. A not-so-young trophy, attractive to attractive people because of who and what I am.

It isn’t really about the way I look or my personality, although I’m diplomatic, even charming when needed, and not as shopworn as I probably deserve to be, blond and strong-featured, my Italian bones a sturdy scaffolding that continues to hold me up through decades of hard times and near misses. I don’t deserve to be slender and toned, and I often joke that a life spent exposed to formalin in windowless rooms and walk-in coolers has preserved me well.